AND ANOTHER THING
De Klerk has engineered a suicide leap into universal suffrage
PAUL JOHNSON
ith the spectacle of tribal savagery W provided by Ruanda-Urundi before every- one's eyes, it seems amazing that South Africa, the last efficient and civilised coun- try on the continent, should be about to launch itself on exactly the same suicidal trajectory. But so it is.
What strikes me about the pseudo-demo- cratic farce about to be enacted in South Africa is how old-fashioned it is. It has the smell of 1960 about it. Instead of Kwame NIcrumah we have Nelson Mandela, whose beliefs indeed echo Nkrumah's fatal slogan: 'Seek ye first the political kingdom and all else shall be added unto you.' In 1960, Ghana was the richest black African coun- try. Now it is one of the poorest and most desp&ate. At present, South Africa is the only country on the continent with the smallest hope of attaining First World sta- tus. What will it be in ten years' time? Pos- sibly a black dictatorship of unparalleled atrocity. Possibly the theatre of one of Africa's endless civil wars. At all events an industrial scrapheap, beastly, bloody and bankrupt.
The country has often seemed to me a metaphor of the world. The scenery is astonishingly beautiful and varied; there is nothing like it anywhere else, even in Kenya. It is big, still largely empty. There is room for everyone, even for industry. The Rand itself has a strange grace, and Johan- nesburg is a handsome town which looks exactly what it is: a massive artefact, put up in a flash, to make money. Its towers and Spoil mountains, which I have painted so often, speak eloquently: 'We are monu- ments to capitalism. Come to us and make Yourselves rich.' And they have come, the whites from all over the world, the blacks from all over southern Africa. Enormous sums have indeed been made. The Rand alone supports half-a-dozen black African economies. Moreover, the exploitation of South Africa's almost limitless natural rich- es is only just beginning. So far we have only scratched the surface of this fabulous land. Given peace, internal order and sensi- ble government, it could become the dynamo which would gradually raise the Whole of black Africa to affluence.
But none of this will now happen. I thought at one point that President de Klerk had some secret, miraculous plan to share power with the blacks without destroying everything. But no; it is just one- person-one-vote: the old, hopeless formula which has failed everywhere else in Africa. South Africa is, humanly, one of the most divided societies on earth: racially, tribally, linguistically, economically. There is not the smallest possibility of it successfully operating a system of universal suffrage and parliamentary institutions, which demand a basis of national homogeneity. What South Africa needs, desperately, is not one-man-one-vote but the rule of law, and equality before the law. If it had these two essentials, its natural wealth, and human ingenuity, would do the rest. South Africa is rich enough to afford every luxury except politics. Politics have been, and will be, its ruin.
The country was designed by nature to be a meritocracy. The deep-level goldmines, those marvellous and terrifying monstrosi- ties, work according to the strict, disci- plined logic of the meritocratic ideal. They are hierarchies. Everyone above you is called 'Sir', always. Everyone below you is called by their Christian name, always. There are no exceptions for race, colour, tribe or anything else. Orders are obeyed instantly. Promotion is strictly on merit and performance. Everyone underground is in danger, all the time, and the rule of law — the natural law of the deep-level mine — is absolute. The system works. These mines are the most efficient in the world, and have been the most successful. It costs a billion dollars to sink a main shaft, but it then provides good jobs for 20,000 people for 100 years, and a fair return on capital. South Africa's problem, it seemed to me, was how to extend the meritocracy of the mines to the running of the country.
The solution would have been to have an electoral roll based on education and prop- erty. It would have been gradually expand- ed to take in everyone as the country grew more prosperous and civilised. The Nation- alist takeover brought all this to a halt in 1948. Apartheid was a system of social engineering, cooked up in the sociology department of Stellenbosch University, which has more in common with Marxist- Leninism or indeed Nazism than anything from the West.
Two of its characteristics were particular- ly fatal to South Africa. First, its racial vot- ing rolls undermined the chances of a meri- tocracy evolving. The Cape Coloureds were taken off the rolls completely. The Asians were excluded. The educated, property- owning blacks were never given a chance. Thus any possibility of creating an expand- ing electorate motivated by rational self- interest rather than by race, colour and tribe was destroyed. Second, by forbidding people of different races to live together, the Nationalists prevented the emergence of a responsible black leadership. Denied entry to the affluent suburbs, wealthy, edu- cated blacks were forced to live in the townships, where they were instantly ter- rorised by radical hooligans. Thus black leadership fell completely into the hands of the men of violence, whose politics, like the Nationalists', are essentially racial, and whose ideological ideas, in so far as they have any, stem from pre-war Stalinism.
Apartheid was a system which could not and did not work and eventually broke down as its own fatuities revealed them- selves. Unfortunately, being an unnatural piece of social engineering rather than an organic growth, it could not evolve into something better. It could only be replaced. De Klerk, being a former supporter of apartheid and a social engineer himself, has replaced it by a suicide leap into universal suffrage. Well may the beloved country cry now. We outsiders can only sit back in anguish and wait for the horrors to emerge. And pray. If ever a country needed prayers, it is that delectable, cursed land of sinister, doomed beauty.
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